Recent Publications Swan I, Guy F, Akeroyd M (2012) Health-related quality of life before and after management in adults referred to otolaryngology. Clinical Otolaryngology (ePub ahead of print) [PubMed] [DOI] Noble W, Naylor G, Bhullar N, Akeroyd MA (2012) Self-assessed hearing abilities in middle- and older-age adults: A stratified sampling approach. International Journal of Audiology (ePub ahead of print) [PubMed] [DOI] Brimijoin WO, McShefferty D, Akeroyd MA (2012) Undirected head movements of listeners with asymmetrical hearing impairment during a speech-in-noise task. Hearing Research (ePub ahead of print) [PubMed] [DOI] Whitmer WM, Brennan-Jones CG, Akeroyd MA (2011) The speech intelligibility benefit of a unilateral wireless system for hearing-impaired adults. International Journal of Audiology 50(12), 905-11 [PubMed] [DOI] Akeroyd MA, Guy FH (2011) The effect of hearing impairment on localization dominance for single-word stimuli. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 130(1), 312-23 [PubMed] [DOI] Broom MA, Capek AL, Carachi P, Akeroyd MA, Hilditch G (2011) Critical phase distractions in anaesthesia and the sterile cockpit concept. Anaesthesia 66(3), 175-9 [PubMed] [DOI] Akeroyd MA, Whitmer WM (2011) Spatial hearing and hearing aids. ENT and Audiology News 20, 76-78 View all publications from this research group
We use psychoacoustic experiments and questionnaires to study how a hearing impairment affects how someone listens and what it means for their quality of life. Our work is both scientific and translational: we are particularly interested in spatial hearing, but we are also studying speech perception and measures of health utility.
Figure 1. An animation of someone moving in response to changes in the direction of a sound
Listening in complex background environments, such as someone else talking or the babble of a coffee shop, can be problematic for speech perception as well as spatial location. Thus speech is also an important part of our research, and here our interests are concentrated upon informational masking and how the target words can be identified in the background. This also informs the third part of our research: how much measures of health-related quality of life (health utility) reflect the wider effects of a hearing impairment.
The auditory perception of location is a central part of everyday listening. The ability to determine the direction of a sound source is such a natural and effortless skill that it is only remarked on in rare or challenging circumstances, such as when a driver cannot determine the direction of the siren of a passing ambulance. As difficulties in locating sounds are an influential contribution to the wider problems faced by hearing-impaired listeners, we are measuring how good people are at locating sounds, in especially in real-world situations such as in a reverberant room or in a dynamically changing background sounds. This links into other work on how fast the auditory system can respond to changing sounds — namely “binaural sluggishness” and the “precedence effect” — and where people orient themselves when listening in rooms.
Figure 2. The loudspeaker ring (bottom) and the motion-tracking system (top) at the Scottish Section
Our primary experimental facility is a ring of loudspeakers. It can present complex sequences of sounds from any direction: we have used it for published experiments on auditory attention, localization of sounds, and — via making a sound appear to come from the considerably further away than it actually is — distance perception in normal-hearing, hearing-impaired, and hearing-aided listeners.